HQ Wins BTN Group’s 2023 Innovator of the Year Award

Enterprise mobility platform HQ took home the BTN Group’s 2023 Innovator of the Year Award at the 10th annual Innovate conference held in New York yesterday. 

“Has anyone noticed how high rates have gotten with rideshare post pandemic? This is an area of corporate travel management that really needs to be managed,” lead judge Norm Rose told the 400-strong Innovate audience as he announced the 2023 Innovator of the Year award winner. “I think in the initial iteration we looked was ‘I’ll cut a deal with Lyft’ or ‘I’ll cut a deal with Uber.’ What HQ brings to the party is true travel management, bringing everything together in one place and we congratulation them on their win.” 

HQ’s end-to-end enterprise platform offers a global platform with connectivity to local ground transportation suppliers with a layer that integrates corporate preferred suppliers and wraps corporate policy, reporting and visibility around it, plus a consistent booking platform for users globally—though it will also collect data from bookings made directly on participating supplier sites. The company vets its transportation suppliers for duty of care and brings negotiated rates to the table as either a primary savings opportunity or to supplement the client’s own preferred supplier rates. 

Chief revenue officer Charity Rumery presented for HQ, satisfying the judges' questions with quick and thorough responses about the technology platform itself, interoperability with supplier direct bookings, duty of care, global coverage, policy points and reporting.

“This is very incredible and very humbling,” said Rumery, accepting the award trophy. “It takes guts to come up here. I’ve presented in a lot of places, and this is one of the finer, pointed places to present. I am so honored for our organization.” 

Innovate judges for 2023 included Amazon Travel and Events manager of hotel programs strategy Jeff Hillenmayer, Travel Tech Consulting president Norm Rose, Acquis corporate travel practice lead Hansini Sharma, and 2022 Innovate winner Troop CEO and founder Dennis Vilovic. 

The People’s Choice

The BTN Group Innovate conference also gives the audience a voice in choosing a winner. This year, the audience voted for a collaboration between two early Innovator of the Year winners: Tripbam, which won the first Innovator of the Year award in 2014, and Emburse Go, formerly known as Roadmap, which won its Innovator of the Year award in 2015. 

The provisionally named Tripbam Go aims to combine the savings potential driven by Tripbam’s hotel re-shopping and re-booking capabilities with the engagement strength of the Emburse Go mobile app, sending directly to the traveler through the mobile app the opportunity to “get a better deal” on their lodging, whether that is a better deal on price only or also a better room, closer to their meeting location, or a number of other possible benefits. By presenting the opportunity directly through the mobile app, pilot testing of the collaboration has shown five times the uptake from travelers, compared to the Tripbam offer delivered through email. That was a win for the audience.

Judges named Navan, presenting its artificial intelligence-driven Ava technology, and Tripkicks, presenting its contextual booking tool overlays, as honorable mentions. Additional participants in the 2023 Innovation Faceoff included AmTrav, ATG, Bizly, BTP Automation, Cerebri AI, HRS, Hubli, Snowfall, Mobility iQ.